Diane Medved is a mother and clinical psychologist who has written sagely about the way the material we witness in the media cannot help but affect us, even if indirectly. Pornography, for example, may not arouse; it may, instead, depress. Either way, a message of bleakness behind the "action" seeps into the mind, like advertising, whether you want it or not. After all, corporations pay lots of money to get their impressions into your head, trusting that it will pay off. What makes you think other messages don't also sink in?
The issue at hand is Bruno. Diane Medved, whose husband, Michael, is a movie critic and has to go see films like Bruno, declined to attend a screening of this picture. She explained this on her blog (July 8). I was going to comment on the film about that same time, but figured that my comments would be dismissed by many readers if I didn't bother to see the film. So I saw it. By and large, Diane was right.
Let it be said that Sasha Baron Cohen is a master comic with a particular gift for reality-tv, Candid Camera style embarrassment. Some of his inventive scenes are inescapably hilarious; others are merely cringe inducing. Regardless, unlike the great comics of yore, such as Charlie Chaplin, deep down Cohen seems to be a misanthrope, a nihilist. He doesn't even really like his own characters. His "Bruno", the gay Austrian fashionista, is a hollow man. There is no way to care about him or anyone else in the film.
In the Victorian Era public art was famously prudish, and the eventual reaction against it was based largely on the proposition that the Victorian moralists were, among other things, hypocrites. In private, they supposedly indulged in the very kinds of vices they deplored in public. Today, we have a new dominant morality, in which the effective highest good is "tolerance" and "diversity". But this morality is hypocritical in its own way, allowing people to defend a behavior (and congratulate themselves in doing so) even while privately scorning that behavior. That is part of Sasha Baron Cohen's insight; he exploits a moral duplicity within his own audience, even while lampooning it. The audience is laughing, but the audience is also the target.
The film presents itself as a satire on celebrity culture. Bruno lets stars like Paula Abdul and Elton John make themselves look foolish, knowing that such people don't really care ultimately if they are exposed as kooks as long as the public continues to notice them. A great many people in this civilization really do care about fame and money to the exclusion of reputation. (Whatever their faults, the Victorians were not so shallow.)
If that was all there was to it, the film would be a small masterpiece. But a satire of celebrity is only the outer layer of the movie. Deeper down, the film is a meditation about itself, and its self not only seems to loathe its subjects, its characters and you, the audience, but also life.
